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James Cagney's Chesty O'Connor is sort of the prototype for Jerry Plunkett, his character in The Fighting 69th (1940), much as this movie is the light-hearted antecedent to that more serious and ambitious film. Nothing in Here Comes The Navy except for the finale is very serious, but Cagney and Pat O'Brien (who was also in The Fighting 69th), and Frank McHugh and Gloria Stuart, along with director Lloyd Bacon, keep things moving at a fast enough pace so that audiences in 1934 couldn't stop to think about some gaps in the logic. The movie doesn't play quite so well today, especially a scene in which Cagney "blacks up" in order to sneak off the ship, though there is one aspect of that sequence, involving Stuart in a passive capacity, that is as remarkable as it was tasteless. The rest is all good fun, and the last section of the movie, depicting the operations of the navy's dirigible fleet circa 1934, is not only suspenseful but will hold special appeal to fans of vintage lighter-and-air craft.